


Revelations

by AdelaCathcart



Category: His Dark Materials (TV), His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, The Book of Dust - Philip Pullman
Genre: Angst and Romance, Cruelty, Daemon Severance/Intercision, Daemon Swapping, Daemon Touching, F/M, Gen, Gratuitous French, Harm to Children, Kidnapping, Spectres, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-05
Updated: 2020-10-11
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:54:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 2,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26835520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AdelaCathcart/pseuds/AdelaCathcart
Summary: Short fics written for HDM Source Fan Week 2020. Tags are added with new chapters.
Relationships: Lord Asriel/Marisa Coulter, Lyra Belacqua & Marisa Coulter, Metatron/Marisa Coulter
Comments: 16
Kudos: 42





	1. A Little Silver Trout

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Day one: favorite character

A child had slipped away from his mother to wander along the canal. She was busy begging for pennies in Market Street, with his baby brother doped and dozing like a cherub in her lap. If he stayed she’d go hungry to feed him, but he was almost six, big enough to find his own supper, and bored with sitting still on the hard pavement with only wadded newspaper for padding.

On the esplanade he cut a hazel branch and fashioned a crude fishing rod. He put it in the water, not with very much hope, scattering catkins that might be mistaken for worms on the glinting surface. His dæmon became a cat and crouched on the bank, flexing her claws. “Get back, Mehitabel,” he hisssed. “You’ll scare the fish.” Then a shadow, long and graceful, fell over the boy and his dæmon, and spread across the water like spilled oil. Every minnow fled.

“Are they biting?” a gentle voice inquired.

A young woman stood behind him on the walkway. She wore a coat of reddish fur, her hair was shiny gold, and her face seemed beautiful and kindly, but with the sun behind her it was difficult to know. She looked like she might give him a copper.

“Not much,” he answered, trying to sound hungry.

Her monkey dæmon, golden too, crept to Mehitabel’s side. Signing for quiet, he took a longish catkin and dropped it a little upstream, making it dance with his fingertips but otherwise still as a statue, until suddenly he sprung. Like lightning, the monkey seized a slim trout and wrestled it from the canal, his sharp white teeth bared in a vicious grin. He dropped it at the woman’s feet, and as it thrashed he bit into the dorsal fin, and tore it off. It came away with a strip of silver skin. Fish blood trickled between the paving-stones. Gills grasped at the thin air like clutching fingers.

“I know a better fishing spot than this. Shall I show you?” the woman said, smiling. Mehitabel sniffed the trout. It slapped her in the nose with its tail, and she leapt backwards, hair on end.

“All right,” said the boy.

She kept him talking so he never saw where they went. “We’ll just stop by my office,” she explained, helping him out of the car. “You don’t mind, do you?” He would have followed her anywhere. The halls were white and sterile, like a hospital, and she brought him to a small room with a chair and a window, curtained on the outside. She gave him a picture book, caressed his cheek with a sweetly scented hand. “This will only take a moment,” she assured him. Then she stepped out, backwards, smiling, and kicked Mehitabel into the hallway and slammed the door.

It was locked, and the chair was bolted down. There were gouges in the white paint, exposing steel beneath, in groups of four.

He felt more than heard his dæmon screaming, her pain mingled with revulsion as she was dragged away by cruel invading hands. He sobbed with terror. Long white fingers jerked the curtains apart.

The kind woman was in a room full of philosophical instruments, observing his agony with huge, pitiless eyes. The boy hurled his small body at the glass, pleading, but in response she only stepped back to make a note on her clipboard. His ears hurt from the noise bouncing off the metal walls—his own cries, he realized, unable to stop them. He clutched his chest, retching, suffocating. As his heart was torn out he was watching her rapt face, the eyes aflame, her hands pressed to the glass. The monkey grinned, the glint of silver scales in his white teeth.


	2. A Woman Clothed in the Sun

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Day two: favorite chapter

The Regent kissed her and it was like kissing the sun. He blazed red through her eyelids. His mouth was flame, his molten saliva stuck to her teeth and burned her tongue. Unable to look at him, she pressed her palms to his huge chest which was like an iron furnace, expecting them to melt. She swallowed a cry as she felt her skin scorching, but he did not damage her as she had feared. Only pain, then, no need to avoid it: enough to make her dizzy, but that she would not let him see.

He smiled and it shook her like an earthquake. “Are you not afraid?”

“Look at me, dear Metatron: I have never in my life been more fearless,” she replied, and it was true. Buried deep, almost too deep to see, there was Asriel, Dust, the abyss, her precious daughter, but brilliant and deafening and _present_ was this, her greatest triumph: the ruler of the Kingdom of Heaven was in her arms, mad with desire. He had offered her an eternal place at his side. 

His hot breath blew across her face. “How sweet human flesh is… I had almost forgotten. I can smell your luscious ripeness”—his burning hands moved greedily over her body—“and even as you stand before me I see you decay.” He lifted her in his arms, spread his enormous wings and soared from the throne of the Clouded Mountain and out into the sky. It was like being held by a comet. “I will put a stop to all of that,” he promised. “But first—take me to Asriel, and we will destroy him.”

Needless to say, she was tempted.


	3. The Reapers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Day three: favorite dæmon

When Marisa first spotted the slave-workers on the plantations of Cameroun, her ravenous curiosity made his golden hair stand on end.

“ _Qu’est-ce que c’est, ces hommes là_?” she demanded of the conductor passing though the carriage.

“ _Pas des hommes, Mademoiselle._ _Zombi_.”

There were a dozen questions on the tip of her tongue, but before she could ask the conductor said sharply, “ _Taisez-vous, s’il vous plaît,_ ” and hurried away as if her interest spread disease.

“Hm!” she sniffed, extinguishing the lamp above her seat to better see into the violet dusk outside. As one, woman and monkey cupped their hands around their eyes and pressed their noses to the glass. An army of men armed with scythes were mowing sheaves of corn in monotonous synchronized strokes. Something about them was hideously wrong. An anbaric bolt of realization struck.

“They have no dæmons,” he whispered, trembling. A chill crept deep into the monkey’s bones, and he crawled into the warm cleft of her lap. She stroked him automatically, still squinting into the dark.

“No dæmons! What must it feel like?”

With every molecule of self-interest in his wicked little heart, he wished the passion in her voice were pity.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "What is that, those men there?"  
> "Not men, Miss. _Zombi_."
> 
> "Be quiet, please."


	4. A List of Injuries

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Day four: favorite scene/moment

A list of injuries.

The blue mark of a pencil point she broke off in his arm.

A dislocated shoulder, when he thought of her while mountain-climbing; worsened when her legs trembled and she fell on him three weeks later.

A broken nose from his fight with Edward Coulter. The loss of his lands and fortune must also be counted.

Gouge-marks from her nails in his hand, infected, which he blamed on a stray cat while his elderly manservant, who had not asked, dabbed them with iodine.

A crack on the skull: hurled into a cell by a bear. The delays to his work, the indignity of all that.

A fractured wrist, which he never noticed, when she pushed him out of the Intention Craft.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [With apologies to _The English Patient_.](https://torrefaction-of-silver.tumblr.com/post/628829651200049152/maybe-its-a-woman-he-met-she-said-look-isnt)


	5. An Explorer in Love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Day five: favorite relationship/dynamic

Nothing on Earth was sacred to him—if truth could destroy it, he would see it destroyed, and he did nothing by halves. He was absolute, and therefore inattentive: once the facts were established he moved on. When he fell in love it was sudden and entire. The man he had been before he met her died not by slow strangulation, but once and for all, by the guillotine. He fascinated her, his demand that circumstance bend to his will, the mountain must come to Mohammed, and the fact that it almost always did was infuriating. He was cocky as a toddler, and to her chagrin he deserved to be.

That was motive enough for her to withhold from him what he wanted. He could accept and build on any settled outcome, no matter how ruinous, but frustration, distraction, delay—these were torture. Every mechanism of power was at his disposal, save one: certainty of her lay beyond his grasp.

Her heart, an abyssal ocean trench, eternal midnight and under tremendous pressure, inaccessible even to herself: how often she had wished sunlight would pierce it, and the universe reveal itself as kind! But the hole in her was bottomless, and nothing could stand there for long, upon all those layers of doubt. She could not promise things she did not know, but attraction to unknown places was in his nature. He would go into her and fill her, persist in that lightless place, until she found him impossible to deny.

He wrote his name on the palm of her hand. “You’re mine, you see?” he said.

“This?” She peered at the writing, bemused. “It’s a birthmark. It might be a scar. I’ve had it since I was a child.”

“It says ‘Asriel,’” he insisted.

“What a strange coincidence.”


	6. The Rescue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Day six: thing you are most looking forward to about season two

The Spectres swept up the mountainside in advance of Mrs. Coulter and her men, and she ordered the soldiers to halt the moment she spied witches in flight. She and her dæmon hiked the last quarter-mile alone, and by the time she reached her daughter women were dropping from the sky all around them, and those not dead lay broken and indifferent where they fell.

Where was the boy? Mrs. Coulter had no time to wonder. Crouching at Lyra’s side in the cover of an outcropping of rock, she unfolded a waxed canvas parcel and lay its contents close at hand. While she gently uncurled the arm of the sleeping girl and held it near the firelight, searching for a serviceable vein, the monkey broke open a glass ampoule of morphia. The first of ten. If she planned the trip well, ten would be enough.

A commotion could be heard from on the summit now, not Spectres but some kind of desperate fighting. Quickly then: Lyra might wake at any time. Mrs. Coulter drew up the medicine and, with great tenderness and care, slid the needle painlessly into her daughter’s arm. Then she put her kit away and tossed the empty vial into the fire.

Lyra would sleep soundly for some hours. The monkey delicately pried the girl’s dæmon from her neck, and draped the limp white ermine over his shoulders like a stole. Mrs. Coulter gathered her child in her arms, pressed a hot kiss to her smooth and sweaty brow, and bore her away to safety.


	7. Because They Should Not

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Day seven: free day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "They put their fingers in because they should not and because they do not get the chance every day." —Jenny Holzer, "The Living Series"

They’d put their fingers in every other part of each other. He had poked his tongue into the hollow of her ear, had tasted her menstrual blood. Once when campfire smoke caught him full in the face she sipped the tears out of his stinging eyes. This was really no different from that.

They moved through the marketplace as strangers, in secret holding one another’s souls. The monkey balanced on Asriel’s shoulder, small testicles hidden by his bandy legs. Asriel couldn’t feel his thoughts but he could guess them, because the little devil was twisting this way and that, his tail flicking anxiously on Asriel’s back, searching for Marisa in the crowd. She was ten feet away, selecting pastries from a baker’s stall. Stelmaria stood regally at her side. One graceful hand absently stroked her head. Stroked _him_.

He reached up to reassure her nervous dæmon. The monkey hugged his wrist and rubbed his goblin’s face hard against Asriel’s palm. The snub-nose and lipless mouth nuzzled his fingers, so unexpectedly tender it was almost impossible to believe it was really Marisa feeling this affection—she who was so pitiless and haughty, whose passion for him was her greatest shame.

“Sir?” The fruit seller was looking at him expectantly. “It’s three seventy,” she prompted. He passed her the coins and she gave him a bundle of lettuce. Marisa was speaking to Stelmaria. Of course he couldn’t make out the words, but it must be a joke of some kind; he felt the snow leopard’s amusement. They exchanged a knowing smile, then turned as one and caught Asriel staring. Both laughed. “She’s beautiful,” the fruit seller said shyly.

“Yes…. What?”

“Your dæmon, sir. I’ve never seen one like that before.”

Asriel plucked the monkey from his back and held him to his chest with one arm, tucking the golden head under his chin. He dug his nails unto the lustrous fur, lightly scratching as he stroked him, and the monkey squirmed with pleasure. Marisa froze. Her eyes locked on Asriel’s were pleading, and she gave a little shake of her head, not wanting to feel it, helpless not to. He made a fist in the monkey’s nape and grinned.

“Nor have I.”


End file.
